It was immensely difficult to keep looking at her, to absorb every burn, laceration, contusion, but he couldn't bear to turn away, because he was afraid that he would forget her. He was afraid that once this moment was over, she would be like a life only dreamed.

THREE

THREE CROWS rose from the empty field of grass that was being obliterated by the erection of four McMansions. The crows, wing feathers iridescent, circled once and were gone. Maybe they knew where Emma was now.

"I don't want to go to the hospital," Jack said.

"Fortunately, you don't get a say in this," Bennett said.

Jack turned his head as two EMTs lifted the gurney he was on into the ambulance. Inside, one of them sat on a bench and monitored his pulse. She was small, compact, dark, Latina. Eyes the color of coffee unadulterated by milk. She smiled at him, showed even white teeth. Bennett sat beside her.

JACK'S MIND seemed to drift, as if the jolt he'd received in the crash had dislodged him from the present. He saw himself standing in National Memorial Park over the freshly dug hole in the ground into which Emma's mahogany casket would be lowered as soon as Father Larrigan ceased his interminable droning. Sharon was standing beside him, but apart. There might have been a continent between them. For her, he didn't exist, or rather, he existed in a world full of horror and death she could no longer inhabit. They'd yelled and screamed at each other, dishes had been hurled, a lamp that caused a flurry of flame that Jack quickly stamped out. No matter. The fight went on as if no bell had rung, until they came to blows, which was what they wanted or, at least, needed. Then all was still, save for Sharon's quiet sobbing.

Father Larrigan was done and the casket began its mechanical descent into the ground.

"No!" screamed Sharon, breaking to the casket. "My little girl! No!"

Jack made a move toward her, but Father Larrigan was closer. He put a sheltering arm around her.

Sharon leaned against his big Irish frame. "Why did Emma die, Father? It's all so senseless. Why did she have to die?"

"God works in mysterious ways," Father Larrigan said softly. "His plan is beyond human understanding."

"God?" Sharon shoved him away from her in disgust. "God wouldn't take the life of a young innocent girl whose life hadn't yet begun. No plan could be so cruel, no plan could excuse my daughter's death. Better to say it was the work of the devil!"

Father Larrigan looked like he was about to faint. "Mrs. McClure, please! Your blaspheming-"

But Sharon would not be denied. "There is no plan!" she howled to Father Larrigan, to the unfeeling sky. "There is no God!"

AS JACK sucked in pure oxygen, his brain ceased its wandering. He opened his eyes.

"Ah, you're with us again," Bennett said.

He sat with only one buttock on the bench, tipped slightly forward. "D'you feel up to telling me what happened, Jack? Last I know you defused the packet of C-four the perp set in the basement of Friedland High School."

To the EMT woman's distress, Jack slipped off the oxygen mask. "The perp broke free of custody, I don't know how. I know my way around that basement, I knew he must be headed for the Bilco doors on the east side-besides the stairs, they're the only way out. I went after him. He hot-wired the principal's car, took off. I took off after him."

"You lost him?"

Jack tried to smile, but grimaced instead. In the aftermath of the crash, his head throbbed, but his body buzzed with the excess adrenaline it was still pumping out. "There's a steep embankment about a half mile back. He swerved into me there. I braked, swung into him, and he did a three-sixty while going off the edge."

The EMT strapped the mask back over Jack's nose and mouth. "Sorry, I need to get him back on oxygen."

Bennett shot her a glance. "Is he in shock?"

"No, but he will be if you keep this up."

Bennett frowned disapprovingly. "I mean, how's he doing overall?"

"There's no outward sign of concussion." She tightened the straps of the mask. "No broken bones, and the laceration to his scalp is superficial." Noting Jack's pallor, she recalibrated the flow of oxygen. "But I'm not a doctor. He needs to be properly evaluated."

The chief nodded vaguely. His face was fissured by hard decisions, painful failures, bureaucratic frustrations, cragged with the loneliness that only men like Bennett and Jack could feel. We're a breed apart, Jack thought. We inhabit the world just like everyone else, but we walk through it as shadows. We have to in order to find the places where the vermin live, worm ourselves in to lure them out, or to chop them into tiny pieces. And after a while, even if we're extremely vigilant, we become so used to being shadows that we don't feel comfortable anywhere else but the darkness. That's when, like it or not, in order to save ourselves, in order to preserve our way of living, we sever our ties with normalcy, because it becomes more and more difficult to make that transition back from the shadows into the light, until it becomes impossible altogether. And then here we find ourselves, deep in the places where only shadows exist.

The ambulance came to a stop, and the EMT woman opened the rear doors. Jack was rolled out of the ambulance, wheeled through the automatic doors of the emergency room.

I'LL HANDLE all the paperwork," Bennett said to the admitting attendant.

"But the patient has to read and agree to-"

"I have power of attorney for the patient," Bennett said in his brook-no-argument tone of voice.

The attendant bristled, gathered herself around her ample bosom. "Do you have proof?"

Bennett whipped out a pad and pen, stared at her ID tag. "Ms. Honeycutt, is it?" He scribbled on the pad. "Gimme the name of your supervisor."

Ms. Honeycutt's glare was as sharp as a scalpel as she handed over the clipboard, but whatever was on her mind she kept to herself, which was all Bennett required.

Jack was sent down for X-rays and a CAT scan. Then his laceration was cleaned and dressed while he was hydrated intravenously.

When Bennett pulled aside the opaque curtain that had been drawn around Jack's cubicle, Jack said, "No breaks, no concussion. Are you satisfied now? Can I get the hell out of here so I can get back to work?"

"In a minute," the chief said. "Your ex is here."

Jack sat up in the bed. "Damnit, not now."

"Too late," a husky female voice said.

Jack, sliding off the bed and onto his feet, saw Sharon appear like a fallen angel.

She smiled. "Hi, Roddy."

"Sharon." The chief leaned forward, pecked her on the cheek. "Good to see you again."

Looking at Jack frown, she said, "I'm glad someone thinks so."

She made her way past Bennett, who behind Sharon's back, gave Jack a small nod of encouragement before disappearing back into the holy hell of the ER, although at this precise moment, Jack didn't really know which was more of a holy hell, outside the curtain or inside.

It was as she stood silently contemplating him that Jack became acutely aware that he was without trousers. Her hair was lighter than it had been when they were married, and she wore different makeup. She looked both familiar and strange to him, as if she had gone through a mysterious transformation.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Rodney called me." She ran a hand through her hair, golden highlights glinting in the overhead fluorescents. "He said he thought you were okay but maybe I should come down and see for myself."

There was some shouting and the hasty squeaks of doctors' rubber-soled shoes on the ER's rubberized floor. The curtain rippled behind him as a patient was wheeled into the next cubicle. From the raised, rushed voice, Jack gathered that there was a lot of bleeding that needed to be stopped, stat.